Thursday, January 19, 2017

Waaaaaay back in 2011, Etsy Greetings featured one of my Petal People cards for Valentine's Day. It is one of my best-selling cards and there are many in my shop to send to your one and only. I am happy to include your personal message for no extra charge and send directly to your recipient. Just let me know your instructions in the notes to seller when you checkout.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Sometimes on days when there's not much going on, I take some of the images from my online shop and run them through Google to see where they appear. I have been quite amused when they appear on pages in different countries where I can't read the language and have to use Google translate. Either Google needs to work on their technology or there are some people writing some crazy things out there!

One site had one of my cards that looks like a fairy written up like this:

我们怎能不赞叹艺术的伟大？

Which translated to this:

These beautiful fairy-tale-like art is made after the flattened with flowers, very funny strange, English has a word called whimsical, is playful meaning, and my new card has the same purpose. These flowers in the bloom, the delicate life by people in this way to continue the joy. How can we not praise the greatness of art?

I get the general tone of the description, but this one I just don't follow:

This one makes sense:

But this one does not:

And sometimes my products make it to sites that leave me scratching my head:

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Thanks to Vogue Vows Celebrancy blog for featuring my plantable paper hearts in their "Top Etsy Picks For Your Ceremony." I appreciate the shout-out. Sorry that I can't ship to Australia, though, because of customs restrictions on shipping live seeds. If you live in the United States, you can get some plantable hearts for yourself. But even if you don't, get my tutorial and make them yourself, no matter where you live!

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

For about a year, I have had customers tell me that I should sell boxed sets of my cards. My customers have always led me in the right direction. But I knew this fact long before anybody was nudging me to do it. What I didn't explain to them was that I was having a hard time figuring out how to do it. I have so many card lines — more than 30 different ones — and boxes that fit either 6 cards or 10 cards in each box. That's a lot of different combinations of cards, and each unique combo would need a unique insert giving an overview of what was inside. I didn't want to commit the cost and time of designing so many different inserts, printing them and then not having the product sell. So I never did dig in and make boxed sets, much to everyone's disappointment.

One day before Thanksgiving, I was talking to Mike, the guy who prints my cards at a professional printing press, when he mentioned that I should make boxed sets of my cards (ha! never heard that before!) and that he could produce a sticky piece of paper with all the designs and info about the cards that I could simply peel off of a backing and stick onto the back of the package. He didn't know it but he actually solved my problem in a bigger way than he imagined. His idea still presented the same problem: a lot of cost for many different combinations of cards, especially when I want to have even more combinations during different seasons or holidays. But a synapse went off in my brain when he talked about a sticker...

About that same time, I had purchased some price stickers for a craft show I was doing. These are the kind of stickers that come with a code inside the box that you can use to go online and design your own template that can be downloaded and printed onto the stickers. In a bit of procrastination, I had been fooling around with the templates and making all kinds of stickers and price tags and other silly things. But in playing with the templates, I realized I could upload images onto the stickers. I had a lot of fun doing something that seemed like it would never serve a purpose. Then Mike mentioned sticker paper.

I started uploading my designs to the templates and — ta da! — made sheets of tiny stickers that I could use to individualize each box of cards.

I must have spent about 3 hours uploading every design, tweaking the placement of the image, saving each design and printing out sheets of stickers for each of my designs. Now I could easily put together a bunch of whatever cards I chose for a package, grab a sticker for each one and slap it on the box. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And if a particular combination doesn't sell, the stickers are removable so I can easily peel them off, add new ones and reuse the box.

I managed to get it all done a couple of weeks before Christmas and sold an impressive amount of packs for gift-giving. As they say, the customer is always right.

Friday, January 6, 2017

Be prepared. I am about to get Martha Stewart all over you. I have bought a lot of washi tape (Japanese decorative tape) recently in my new adventures in keeping a bullet journal. But it has come in handy in so many other ways. I was recently poking around my favorite antique store when I found these sweet little berry boxes:

I am always on the lookout for new ways to display my cards and artwork. During the holiday season, I had a lot of my display boxes and baskets tied up at various holiday shows and shops. I need more ways to display my work every year as my list of sellers expands. The berry boxes were perfect for all my new card lines at the perfect price ($5 for a whole stack of them) but they were just a little bit inexpensive looking. I was trying to figure out how to make them look a bit more stylish but still keep their sweet garden feel — oh and not spend a cent to do it — when I remembered all the lovely washi tape I had in my studio. A simple stripe of tape across the front of each and I felt like the tape dressed up each berry box in an understated way without taking away from the product I was displaying and selling.

And after spending about an hour on Pinterest looking at what others have made with washi tape, I am making a trip back to the craft store to get more colors and patterns for other project ideas. If Martha Stewart calls, tell her I'm busy. I am digging around in my drawers looking for the rest of my washi supplies!

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

All of my new cards — 13 new lines including the ones shown here plus others — have now been disbursed all over kingdom come. Find them wherever my cards are sold. Thanks to all the loyal followers who have encouraged me to keep making new designs. I am already creating new ones for later this year!